Hepatic C9 cells switch their behaviour in short or long exposure to soft substrates.

This study shows that the exposure of C9 cells to soft substrates promoted a decrease of cell proliferation rate, as reported for other types of cells on PDMS, whereas a much longer term exposure caused cells to adapt to softness after trained for several passages, reactivating proliferation. During this phenomenon, the morphology and phenotype of trained cells was modified accompanying the increase of cell proliferation rate contrary to the effect observed in short periods of cell culture. In contrast to previous reports, cell death was not observed during these experiments, discarding a cell selection mechanism and suggesting soft cell adaptation may be limited in time in C9 cells.